Animo nullius: on AI's origin story and a data colonial doctrine of discovery

Abstract

This paper traces elements of the theoretical origins of artificial intelligence to capitalism, not neurophysiology. It considers efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formalize a science of mental behaviour using the dynamics of social rather than neural phenomena. I first revisit early American theorists’ controversial ambivalence toward neurophysiology, showing how this group benefited from post-war corporate and military investments in commercial and imperial expansion, which sustained and expanded their influence over the emerging field. I then trace the lasting effect of the founders’ early rhetoric through AI's institutionalization after 1960, arguing that from the 2010s technology corporations set out to veil their enclosure of the data commons via appeal to a curious precedent: the scientific pedigree of AI. By relating the field to the history of capitalism, and specifically the rise of assetization in modern technoscience, I invite reflection on AI's origin story and on broader parallels between historical colonialism and data colonialism. I offer a heuristic – animo nullius, for ‘no persons’ mind’ – as an attempt to name rhetorical manoeuvres that leverage the authority of mind-as-computer metaphors in order to naturalize acts of seizure.